Capital punishment, otherwise known as the death penalty, is currently a legal practice in 25 states across America. Three additional states: Pennsylvania, Oregon, and California have a governor imposed moratorium on capital punishment, meaning the law is currently suspended but can be used if deemed worthy.
The United States is the only Western country that still administers capital punishment. It would be impossible to convince all individuals that this in itself is unethical, but it is a fact that the administration of the death penalty in the United States is unfairly influenced by race. According to the ACLU, “the color of a defendant and victim's skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America. People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43% of total executions since 1976 and 55% of those currently awaiting execution.”
Systemic racism exists and is an insidious force in every step of the United States criminal process. We see this inequity in arrests, “in 2016, black Americans comprised 27% of all individuals arrested in the United States—double their share of the total population” 1 and in sentencing, “Young black and Latino males tend to be sentenced more severely than comparably-situated white males and unemployed black males tend to be sentenced more severely than comparably-situated white males.”2 It follows that this disparity would persist throughout the entire criminal justice system; culminating in perhaps the most egregiously dangerous form with the unequal administration of the death penalty.
The skin color of the defendant and the victim plays a critical role in determining recipients of the death penalty in America. According to the ACLU, 80% of all Capital cases involve white victims, despite white victims only accounting for 50% of all murder victims. In 2020, the United States executed 17 offenders. Of the 17, all were men, ten were white, five were Black, one was Hispanic, and one was Navajo. In the United States, Black people comprise approximately 13% of the United States population, yet they made up 29% of the executions last year. The representation of Native Americans on death row was also disproportionate to their population percentage in 2020, making up only 2.4% of the population but 5.8% of executions. If sentencing a human being to death is permissible under any circumstances, it must at least be done justly, and the decision should be free from individual biases or racial prejudices. This is clearly not possible.
The controversial execution of Nathaniel Woods in 2020 reignited the argument that the existence and administration of the death penalty disproportionately harms minorities and more specifically Black men. Nathaniel was convicted of the murder of three police officers by a majority white jury in the majority-black city of Birmingham, Alabama. Despite Nathaniel's 10-2 conviction, many individuals were convinced of his innocence. Kerry Spencer, the man arrested alongside Nathaniel insisted that he had no part in the killing, and never fired a weapon. Civil Rights leaders Shaun King and Martin Luther King III became involved in Woods’ case days before his scheduled execution and urged Governor Kay Ivey to alter his sentence.
According to USA Today, one of the murder victims’ sisters, Kimberly Chishom Simmons, also requested clemency from Governor Ivey, saying, “[Woods] didn’t kill my brother, and he didn’t kill the other officers, may they rest in peace. I'm asking for mercy, and I believe my brother would want me to take a stance because of the man he was." All requests for clemency were denied and 43-year-old Nathaniel Woods was executed on March 5, 2020.
The racial bias present in the decision to assign death to a human being is absolutely unacceptable. Until there is a massive reckoning on the racial bias present in our criminal justice system, the administration of the death penalty will always be unethical.
Sources:
https://www.aclu.org/other/race-and-death-penalty
https://books.google.com/books?id=2LylU2Yp6NYC&pg=PA89#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offenders_executed_in_the_United_States_in_2020#:~:text=A%20total%20of%20seventeen%20death,injection%20and%20one%20by%20electrocution.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/03/17/before-nathaniel-woods-execution-sister-victim-begged-mercy/5064934002/
